Orlando Gunman’s Wife Breaks Silence: ‘I Was Unaware’

Image

Noor Salman, who was married to Omar Mateen, says his rampage at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., has left her shattered. “He has hurt a lot of people,” she says.CreditCreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Things finally seemed to be going better for Noor Salman and her husband, Omar Mateen. He had been accepted into a police training program and had showered her with jewelry to celebrate. He had given her permission to visit her family in California and handed her spending money for the trip. And he had stopped hitting her.

So when Mr. Mateen told her that he would not be home for dinner the afternoon of June 11, she asked him not to go. It was Saturday — and she hoped it would be a family night. But he told her that he had to see a friend, kissing her and hugging their 3-year-old son as he left.

Mr. Mateen never returned home. Instead, he drove two hours from the family’s home in Fort Pierce, Fla., to a nightclub in Orlando, where he killed 49 people and wounded dozens more before the police fatally shot him, ending one of the worst terrorist attacks in the United States since 2001.

Ms. Salman, whose parents immigrated to the United States from the West Bank in 1985, was immediately a person of interest. F.B.I. agents questioned her for hours, eliciting from her that she had been with her husband when he bought ammunition and scouted the club. Some agents came to believe that she was not being truthful.

But in an interview, the first she has given, Ms. Salman denied any involvement in the attack or any knowledge of what her husband was going to do. She described him as someone who angered easily, beat her often and lived his life in secret.

Image

The Father’s Day card Ms. Salman wrote for Mr. Mateen, on behalf of their son.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

“I was unaware of everything,” she said. “I don’t condone what he has done. I am very sorry for what has happened. He has hurt a lot of people.”

Her husband’s crime, Ms. Salman said, has left her shattered and afraid. She lives in fear of turning on the television and hearing Mr. Mateen’s name. She often can’t get out of bed and depends on members of her family to take care of her son. She has moved three times since the attack, hoping to avoid the news media, and asked that her current location not be disclosed.

And she lives in legal limbo, with prosecutors weighing charges that could include lying to the F.B.I. Her lawyers, Linda Moreno and Charles Swift, say their client did nothing wrong. They declined to let Ms. Salman, 30, talk about her discussions with the F.B.I., but Mr. Swift said she had told investigators “everything she knew to the best of her ability.”

In the interview, Ms. Salman said she had a reason for talking publicly now: “I just want people to know that I am human. I am a mother.”

She first met Mr. Mateen in 2011 on an internet dating site called Arab Lounge. She was smitten almost immediately. While he was religious and she was not, it was not an issue. “I thought he was the whole package,” she recalled.

Image

In the days before Mr. Mateen carried out the massacre at the nightclub, he learned that he had been accepted into a police training program, an aspiration of his.Creditvia Noor Salman

She also thought she was getting a second shot at happiness.

Ms. Salman grew up in Rodeo, Calif., one of four daughters of a small-business man. She was a poor student in high school but earned an associate degree in medical administration at a local college. Her dream was to fall in love, but the arranged marriage in 2006 with a man she had met on a trip to her father’s hometown did not work out.

Mr. Mateen, the son of Afghan immigrants, had also been married before. He never told Ms. Salman that his first wife left him after he began beating her.

They were engaged shortly after meeting online and married soon afterward. Wedding photographs show a happy couple, eating cake and holding hands. In one photograph, Mr. Mateen is dancing awkwardly. Another depicts them covered with a shawl and looking into a mirror as a married couple for the first time, an Afghan tradition.

After they married, the couple moved to Fort Pierce and into a two-bedroom condominium that Mr. Mateen’s mother owned. Ms. Salman quickly became pregnant. Her husband worked nights as a security guard, and she cooked and did the laundry.

“He was a gentle spirit,” she said.

But Mr. Mateen’s behavior changed abruptly about six months into the marriage. Once, after the couple went shopping for baby clothes while she was pregnant, Mr. Mateen flew into a rage and punched his wife’s shoulder hard enough that it bruised, she said. Afterward, they drove to his parents’ house, and before they went inside, he warned her: “Wipe your eyes. This stays between us, or it’s going to get worse.”

Image

Ms. Salman took this photograph of her husband in April.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

When he became angry, he would start biting his lips and clenching his fists. In public, he also had a code word he used if she was doing something he didn’t like. He would call her “shar.” That was short for sharmuta — slut or whore in Arabic.

He would also pull her hair, something she has since learned he also did to his first wife. He choked her and threatened to kill her. He never said he was sorry. “He had no remorse,” she said.

But Ms. Salman said she was afraid to end the marriage. If she left, Mr. Mateen taunted her, he would get custody of their son. “You have no proof I hit you,” he said. “No job.”

Warning signs of radicalization can seem obvious in hindsight. Ms. Salman knew her husband watched jihadist videos, but she did not think much of it because the F.B.I. seemed to have cleared him, she said.

Agents had investigated Mr. Mateen in 2013 after he told work colleagues he was a member of Hezbollah, had family ties to Al Qaeda and wanted to die as a martyr. Ten months later, the F.B.I. closed the case. That same year, the agency questioned him again in connection with another terrorism investigation. So when Mr. Mateen told his wife to mind her own business about the videos, she did.

Jacquelyn Campbell, a nurse and professor at Johns Hopkins University who has received funding from the Justice Department for research on domestic violence, evaluated Ms. Salman’s case at the request of her lawyers. Ms. Salman, she said, was in extreme danger from her husband. “She would be totally oblivious to clues that he is getting radicalized or planning anything,” Ms. Campbell said.

Ms. Salman was too busy trying to survive.

Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University who has studied the role of women and children in terrorist groups, is more skeptical. She said there had been instances in which terrorists like Mr. Mateen had managed to keep quiet about their plans. But she pointed to a recent study of 119 lone-actor terrorists in Europe and the United States. Researchers found that in about 64 percent of the cases, relatives and friends had been aware of the individual’s intent to commit terrorism.

“It’s possible she didn’t know because he was not confiding in her, but she does have every incentive in the world to retell this story as a different kind of victim,” Ms. Bloom said. “I am not trying to minimize the experience she had in a domestic abusive relationship, but it doesn’t give her a free pass as a bystander to not come forward.”

Suspicions about what Ms. Salman might have known focus on several trips she took with her husband.

In April 2015, Mr. Mateen took his wife and son to Disney World. Law enforcement officials suspect that Mr. Mateen went there to see if it would be a good target and hinted at his intentions to conduct an attack. Ms. Salman’s lawyer would not let her discuss what Mr. Mateen said at the amusement park.

Ms. Salman also went with her husband to buy ammunition at Walmart. She did not think this was suspicious, she said. Her husband was a security guard and regularly visited the shooting range. Ammunition was cheaper at Walmart than at the range, she said.

Similarly, when she and her son accompanied him to Orlando in the months before the shooting, she said, she had no idea he was checking out Pulse, the nightclub he eventually attacked. He told her, “Let’s go to Orlando for a drive,” she recalled.

The F.B.I. is still sorting out these accounts.

In the last weeks of Mr. Mateen’s life, Ms. Salman said, her husband started being kind again. She believed she was being rewarded for her silence.

On the day of the attack, Mr. Mateen came home from work around 3 p.m. He told Ms. Salman about the trip to California to visit her mother for the first time in years. He gave her $500 for the trip, and drove her and their son to McDonald’s. They stopped at a bank, where Mr. Mateen withdrew another $500 for his wife. Then he left.

At home that night, Ms. Salman filled out a Father’s Day card she had bought for her husband and went to bed. At about 4 a.m., Mr. Mateen’s mother called, worried and looking for him. Ms. Salman tried calling him on his cellphone but got no answer.

Finally he sent her a text message: Did you see what happened? She texted back that she had not.

“I love you babe,” he responded, the last she heard from him.

Later that morning, she learned from the F.B.I. that her husband had died in a shootout after carrying out a mass murder. Months later, recalling that day, she began to cry.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Wife of Orlando Gunman Breaks Silence and Says, ‘I Was Unaware’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe